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WeChat By Tencent: From Chat App To Social Mobile Platform

Instant messaging is the killer app on desktops. From IRC to ICQ to AIM to Trillian to Yahoo! Messenger to (soon defunct) Microsoft’s Live Messenger to Facebook Messenger, millions around the world have been using instant messaging for real-time communication and collaboration since the dawn of the World Wide Web.

Today, the rise of smartphones and proliferation of mobile broadband have augmented instant messaging with mobility. WhatsApp and Kik Messenger (among others) are thriving in the new mobile chat frontier. WhatsApp users sent over 10 billion messages per day! Kik is now 30 million users strong. Even the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, has re-positioned its Messenger app to ride the surging popularity wave of mobile chat.

Made-in-Asia chat apps too are growing by leaps and bounds, particularly in the Asian region. Tencent’s WeChat app, for example, has doubled its users base in 6 months or so – from some 100 million users in March 2012 to 200 million in September 2012. In mid-January 2013, its total users has surpassed 300 million worldwide. (Other than WeChat, apps like KakaoTalk, LINE, and GREE Messenger are also thriving).

Tencent QQ is already a wildly popular instant messaging platform in China, with over 700 million active users. And mobile chat is a natural extension for Tencent. In January 2011, the largest Internet company in China launched its chat app as ‘Weixin.’ In April 2012, the app was rebranded as WeChat and began aggressive globalization push. The app now has users in over 30 countries. Although the majority of WeChat users are from China, it is the number of users from outside China that is growing at accelerated rate in the past couple of years. For example, in Malaysia the app experienced a hyper-growth rate of over 400% since its launch in June 2012 and has reached the 1 million users mark in November 2012.

What are the factors that spur the impressive users growth? Tencent’s Country Manager (Malaysia and Singapore), Louis Song said:

WeChat is the hottest social chatting apps in the world right now, it has robust features like free messaging, hold to talk, VOIP/Video call, photo albums, shake and look around (among others), and it’s very easy to use and the interface is very user friendly. It is a unique app with all these popular chatting and social functions, all-in-one make user very convenient in WeChat and no need to turn to others. The product quality itself is the most important thing in mobile internet industry, the only reason user love it is that it’s a good app, you can simply think that 300 million users’ choice definitely will not go wrong.

Tencent has a big ambition for WeChat and envisioned it to be a social mobile platform. Platform seems like today’s proven path to commercialize a community. WeChat already has a thriving community of users and user-generated contents. It is now in the process of integrating WeChat with TenPay (Tencent’s payment service). Not only relying on the virtual economy on WeChat (i.e. mobile gaming, virtual goods), Tencent plans to creatively leverage the commercial upside of online to offline space. Mr Song elaborated:

What’s the major difference between WeChat and other chatting apps is that WeChat is not just chatting, WeChat is a social mobile platform, and WeChat already opened its API to third party developer, that means any third party apps can integrate with WeChat, and enjoy the big WeChat user base for their potential growth as long as your apps is welcomed by the users.

Besides the open API, WeChat will also connect the online to offline (O2O) by QR code, any brand/merchant can have their own WeChat public accounts, then using WeChat as their channels connecting with their customers, and by leveraging HTML5 technology later, and also, e-commerce, customer service, and mobile gaming will all be integrated with WeChat soon. This is definitely a blue sea for mobile internet industry.

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Comments

Well done Tencent! I will then try WeChat. It can’t be bad. I have been using the international version of QQ as my instant messenger of choice for years, and it’s always been better than many others made by famous Western companies. Tencent makes top-notch products and I love this company.

We chat sounds to be a great instant messaging app. But i’ve been using IMiN Messaging since it is dedicated for businesses, offices or work spaces where all the employee can be talk constantly with high security. But Ten cent is quite buzzing now therefore i am definitely gonna give a short to we chat…